Pedro Domingos Mocks AI Doom Narrative: The Only Thing Out of Control Is the Doomers
On September 16–17, Pedro Domingos, UW professor and machine learning researcher, fired off a barrage of posts mocking AI risk and safety discourse — the latest round in the doomers-vs-skeptics feud. He claimed the only thing out of control in AI is the doomers themselves, and told Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that AI systems are 'windmills, not giants,' casting risk narratives as Quixotic phantom enemies.
Confirmed
- Domingos sarcastically credited the EU AI Act with being the reason AI hasn't wiped out humanity — an ironic jab at EU regulation.
- He likened 'AGI Derangement Syndrome' (ADS) to a disease: some people are more susceptible, it's contagious, infects the brain, and has no vaccine.
- He mocked industry rhetoric: the same failure sounds far scarier as a 'swarm of rogue agents' than 'malfunctioning parallel processes,' and noted AI companies can dodge liability by saying a system 'went rogue' while urging others to slow down research.
- In an exchange with Nate Silver, he split the anti-AI camp into mutually hostile 'doomers' and 'wokes,' advised ignoring both, and claimed Emily Bender's anti-ML stance stems from ML's rise ending her hand-coded-grammar career.
- He observed that the deepest skeptics of AI catastrophe scenarios are experts in directly relevant fields like cybersecurity and biology.
- Developer kristoph echoed the stance, calling p(doom) narratives baseless personal inventions whose authors would be deemed cranks in other industries.
Why it matters
Domingos's posts crystallize AI-community frustration with safety narratives, regulatory efforts like the AI Act, and the 'went rogue' liability culture, setting up a direct clash with safety advocates like Amodei and reigniting motive debates around academic critics like Bender — a snapshot of the polarized discourse around AGI hype and risk communication.
2026-09-16 ~ 2026-09-17 · 10 related posts
- Episode 1: Bostrom and Domingos debate whether AI will kill humanity on CNN(2026-09-15, 2 posts)
- Episode 2: Pedro Domingos Mocks AI Doom Narrative: The Only Thing Out of Control Is the Doomers(2026-09-16, 10 posts)
Primary sources
- [source] Pedro Domingos to Dario Amodei: They're Not Giant Monsters, They're Just Windmills — pmddomingos · 2026-09-16
- [source] Pedro Domingos: The Only Thing Out of Control in AI Is the Alarmists — pmddomingos · 2026-09-16
- [source] Pedro Domingos mocks EU AI Act as the only reason AI hasn't wiped out humanity — pmddomingos · 2026-09-16
- Pedro Domingos: AI companies dodge blame by calling failures 'going rogue' — pmddomingos · 2026-09-16
- Pedro Domingos: AI's two warring anti-AI factions — doomers and wokes — best ignored — pmddomingos · 2026-09-16
- Domingos: The biggest AI catastrophe skeptics are cybersecurity and bio experts — pmddomingos · 2026-09-16
- Domingos claims Emily Bender's anti-ML stance stems from her manual-grammar career being made obsolete — pmddomingos · 2026-09-16
- Pedro Domingos: "Swarm of Rogue Agents" Just Sounds Better Than Malfunctioning Parallel Processes — pmddomingos · 2026-09-16
- Developer slams AI industry's p(doom) as baseless made-up number — kristoph · 2026-09-16
- Pedro Domingos mocks "AGI Derangement Syndrome" as contagious brain disease — pmddomingos · 2026-09-17